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Friday, January 4, 2013

Kitty survived Hitler, but can she survive the smell test?

It's a riveting story. You can't read this and not instantly draw parallels between what's happening right now in America and the preliminary opening moves that Adolf Hitler used to begin his failed drive to world domination. Hitler and Obama were both charismatic, both wildly popular, both adored by the young, the poor, the jealous, and the outcast. People back then just like people today—whether they'll come out and admit it or not—want an all-powerful ruler who'll finally make everyone exactly equal...with the biggest fans being made more-equal in this new oligarchy than those who perhaps lacked the requisite enthusiasm.

The first thing I do when I read something like this story is I try to remember the Wizards First Rule:

Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

It's why I never pass on chain-letters. This story was great. It was a whole order of magnitude better than the typical chain letter. Unfortunately it doesn't pass the sniff test. For one thing in the second sentence it says:

Read this Jewish woman’s eyewitness account of the loss of freedom in her native Austria:

However, later in the article we discover that Kitty Werthmann is sent to a convent. I'm not aware of any Jewish convents, only Catholic ones. However that alone doesn't mean it might not be true. After all, sometimes Jewish girls are sent to convents.

The pungent aroma that really stands out, the stinkiest part of this article is the story that Austria voted to allow Hitler to "annex" Austria. Several times you'll read that "98%" of Austrians "voted" to become a German state, but if you read the actual history of the Anschluss with Austria, that's just not how it happened. First Hitler pressured Austria to allow his "Nazi Party" to operate with impunity. Later these Nazi agitators seeded the Austrian ground with Satan's twin horns: jealousy and tribalism. The Austrian economy was soon crushed by the Austrian Nazi Party's escalating efforts to generate political unrest. This caused economic panic. There was a run on the banks and Austrians withdrew all of their money. Orders for goods and services from overseas were then canceled. Tourism faded to nothing. It was only then, in the aftermath of economic collapse caused deliberately by Nazis with the collaboration of an Austrian fifth-column and with the rulers of Austria cowering in abject fear at this insane leviathan of war that had materialized at their door-step over night that Hitler's tanks rolled in, uninvited. And it was only later that a vote was held...at gunpoint.
The actual history diverges from the tale told by our Jewish survivor radically at this point, because anybody who understands these historical facts understands that this was not a marriage between Germany and Austria. This was a rape.

As the paradigm distilled from the Kitty Werthmann saga concludes: people will accept the vilest and most horrific evils if you only do it to them slowly. That part of the story is true. A series of tiny indignities and little outrages culminated in the Holocaust. It was a coordinated and diabolical plan that was engineered by Hitler and his disciples. Austria didn't vote for it. And so this story fails the smell test. Sorry Kitty. Maybe you survived Hitler but you didn't survive the smell test.